Inside Sales Best Practices

Are your sales reps spending their time wisely? CSO Insights reports that the average sales rep only spends two days a week effectively selling. The rest of the time, your reps are probably looking for someone to call, writing emails, leaving voicemails and logging call notes. Cold calling and sales prospecting teams often make these [...]

“Can wearing black really give you a sales edge?” It’s a question our good friend Jill Konrath asked in her LinkedIn post on April 24. Konrath ultimately concludes that wearing black might bring more boldness to the sales mindset, and boldness gives you an edge. But what if there is a way to achieve that [...]

Does your sales reporting strategy provide enough detail to accurately answer these questions? Who is most likely to answer your calls right now? How many times should you contact each prospect? What are your peak answer times? Which reps are dialing, but not being effective? If you found yourself shaking your head, you’re not alone. [...]

Oil and water. The Hatfields and McCoys. Sales and marketing. Too often these two revenue-generating groups are in conflict with each other. You know how the battle goes. Sales complains that marketing is not producing enough quality leads. Marketing fires back that sales isn’t working the supplied leads hard enough. The gloves come off and between [...]

Where does marketing end and sales begin? With increasingly self-educated buyers, the roles of sales and marketing are becoming harder to define and distinguish. The most successful teams marry the two functions as closely as possible. Christine Nurnberger, the award-winning VP of marketing at SunGard Availability Services, has mastered the science of aligning marketing with [...]

Sales conferences serve up best practices and provide amazing networking opportunities that can lead to new business. Plus, they’re a lot of fun. InsideSales.com recently completed its first customer conference, IS Accelerate 2014, in Park City, Utah. Attendee feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and we’re already getting ready for next year’s event. Here’s a list [...]

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before … By some amazing stroke of luck, one of your inside sales reps lands a monster deal and then decides to take a nap for the rest of the month. After crushing their quotas, reps sometimes see little reason to endure the daily grind of smiling and [...]

Call evaluation may seem like a mundane process, listening to call after call, but it’s worth every minute. It allows you to collect an insane amount of data you can use to improve your sales calls. At InsideSales.com, we’ve gathered valuable information about top-performing sales reps, which has helped us to train lower-performing reps more [...]

Systems thinking at InsideSales.com is a process of understanding how systems behave, interact with their environments, and influence each other. A system is composed of parts generally identified as people, processes and technologies. Systems receive inputs and transform them into outputs for other systems in the larger environment. A system must contain all of the [...]

“2013 was a good year.” You’ll be telling your grandkids that some day. But for now, it’s simply fun to reflect on the best of the year that was. We’ve pulled together a list of the most popular inside sales posts from our blog in 2013. They cover a wide range of topics, from CEO [...]